Busy making things: @mc, notes, tinycast, github, links, photos.
Scott Johnson has coverage of PHPCon 2002.
Wow. That and “Outstanding” are pretty much my comments on PHP Con 2002. Not only did they put on a great conference, everyone learned something (and I mean everyone), there were great networking opportunities.
Read the rest if you are a phphead.
Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree.
A lot is going on in the embedded Linux community. I attended a real-time and enbedded conference about 6 months ago, and there were several vendors there, each with their own customized toolchain. Several of those vendors also had programmers that worked on kernel code, that then fed back to the community. Good stuff.
CNet/Michael Kanellos: Dell thinks small.
The OptiPlex SX260 is roughly the size and shape of a standard dictionary. The computer weighs 7.8 pounds and comes with an Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processor and six USB ports. The computer can be mounted horizontally, vertically, under a desk, on a wall or behind a flat-panel monitor.
[…]
The SX260 (the s stands for small) measures 9.7 inches by 9.5 inches and is roughly 50 percent smaller than Dell’s next smallest desktop. The most basic configuration sells for $599. A typical configuration will sell for $1,499 and come with a 2GHz Pentium 4, 256MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, a 15-inch flat panel and a CD-ROM drive.
And to think that I paid close to three grand for a decked out Dell PII-450 with a 19″ monitor years ago. Markets change.
Doug Kaye has just posted an essay entitled The Web Services Technology Pipeline. Read it and let him know what you think.
The Jakarta Commons Digester is a popular open source utility that facilitates XML file processing. This article provides an overview of Digester, followed by an example that uses Digester to parse an XML configuration file. [via NewsForge]
OSNews/Clinton De Young: Debian 3.0 Step by step (by step by step by step…)
This walkthrough does not cover every last facet of installing Debian, but it is quite thorough, and even painfully detailed. I wrote this with somebody completely new to Linux and Debian, but somewhat familiar with their computers, in mind. I hope people new to Debian find it useful.
I’m a trebuchet addict, so I had to post this for posterity [metafilter]:
Trebuchets , Trebuchets, Trebuchets: where geeks get medieval on thine ass. Some people have a love of history, spare time and an excuse to buy more tools. (His Earth Viewer is cute, too) Also needed are open expanses–like in Australia. Note: Punkin’ Chunkin’ (©donkeymon 11/03/01) 2002 is coming up in a week. Will Team Banka’s Pumpkin Slayer return? Also, there’s Gulf Wars XII for y’all next March. And, courtesy Nova, for the shockwave addicted, Play Destroy The Castle! Manual here. Also, here’s the Virtual Trebuchet java applet. And last, massive trebuchet linkage.
The best part of a recent slashdot article:
CNet:
The next version of the heart of the Linux operating system is expected by June, project founder and leader Linus Torvalds predicted on Thursday.
Will Web Services Change Web Hosting? The high-end web-hosting business is cooling off, but web services are on fire. What’s going to happen when they meet? I recently spoke to some of the movers and shakers of the web-hosting world, and asked them how they were anticipating the arrival of web services. [My October column for The Web Host Industry Review]
Up until just now I had been poo-pooing .Net – I’ve really taken absolutely no interest. C# is easy if you know Java, .Net the libraries are just a bunch of class libraries I can pick up, and while IL I’d be interested in, it’d take more time to really understand deeply than I was willing to give right now.
Then I got a call from a recruiter. I told him I wasn’t in the market right now, of course – anyone who’s been following my weblog realizes how much work I’ve had in school this past week, for instance – but that I’d be happy to be back at work. Compared to work, I hate school. So he asked my timetable for school, and I told him, and he said he’d keep in touch.
Before we got off the phone, he recommended that I learn C# and .Net. He didn’t really seem to know what they were, but he said that that’s what’s going to be big. Like I said, up until now I’ve been poo-pooing .Net, but today I’ve realized that maybe someone will be willing to pay me to do it. I’m more interested now… 🙂 So maybe I should keep my “skills” up to date with .Net…
C# is wicked cool, and seems natural from a Java programmer’s point of view.
Magnus Lie Hetland: Instant Python.
To begin with, think of Python as pseudo-code. It’s almost true. Variables don’t have types, so you don’t have to declare them. They appear when you assign to them, and disappear when you don’t use them anymore. Assignment is done by the
=operator. Equality is tested by the==operator. You can assign several variables at once.
Dude. I always knew that Python ruled, but I needed this bootstrap a lot. Everything python that I’ve read makes complete sense, but this feels like a handy dandy reference for programmers who need to know the basics of py.
Blocks are indicated through indentation, and only through indentation.
I love this language.
Tara Sue Grubb votes GNU.
Francois Lane, the publisher of the Zoyth and Amazon weblogs, is offering to fill weblogs with thousands of phony referrers for $1,000 U.S. He’s hit this weblog three times today from the IP address 207.253.71.48, putting his own URL as the referral. (Via Blogroots.)
I’ve had similar referral spam for my weblog, one or two hits.
Today Neal Ferguson’s support for the IBM S390 was checked into CVS.
The XSP processor has been fully integrated into the System.Web assembly, and Gonzalo has finished the hosting interfaces in Mono. This means that it is possible to embed ASP.NET with the same APIs used in Windows, and is possible to easily embed it with Apache for example.
We are looking for contributors that know Win32 to contribute to the Windows.Forms implementation. If you want to help write some controls using the Win32 API, get in touch with our new mono-winforms-list@ximian.com list mailing list.
Tim’s TDS System.Data set of classes can now talk to SQL servers using the TDS protocol (version 4.2). Currently it can connect, run transactions, update/insert/delete, and read some types. A data adapter is also coming soon.
Jim Klopfenstein is working on executing .asmx files without a web server. If you’ve ever played around with .net, this should at the very least interest you.
I’m writing Java code to read Advogato diary entries using the site’s XML-RPC interface and the Apache XML-RPC library. I can’t get the getDates() method to work, and the cause appears to be some off-spec XML-RPC encoding in the response, as I describe on the XML-RPC discussion board. Help from XML-RPC gurus would be appreciated. I’m so deep into this debugging effort that I feel like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“The horror. The horror.”).
Debugging web services == no fun.
TCPTrace can help, but it’s often not enough.
WebServices.Org: Westbridge Technology uses Ethereal, the open source network sniffer, to monitor SOAP traffic.
Mountain View, CA – October 21, 2002 – Westbridge Technology, Inc., a provider of security and monitoring solutions for XML Web Services has announced general availability of the Westbridge XML SOAP Monitor. The Westbridge XML SOAP Monitor enables enterprises to easily and effectively monitor their networks for all XML Web Services traffic without requiring changes to the network.
Dale Pike: “on links and chunks”
“…A piece of information has no value until it is linked to other information.”
CNet/Larry Dignan: “The ultimate promise of Web services–delivering software as a service–is at least a decade away from being fulfilled, according to a report from IDC.”
In the report, released Thursday, the market researcher said that Web services are proving their worth as corporations adopt the concept and plug disparate systems together, but also that the changeover still has years to go to reach its high-water mark.
…
For Web services to work as imagined, IDC said, technology hurdles must be the first challenges overcome, but businesses also will have to change the way they view software and intellectual property rights. Proponents of the Web services vision also face work in the areas of security, standards and privacy.